(CNN) -- (CNN) -- U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel announced Thursday that the United States has evidence that chemical weapons have been used in Syria.

This comes a couple of days after an Israeli intelligence official said Damascus was using weapons banned under international law against its own people in the country's civil war. Syria has said rebels have used chemical weapons.

U.S. President Barack Obama has said the Syrian government's use of chemical weapons against its own people in the country would be a "game changer."

7-year-old totes AK-47 assault rifle in Syrian civil warNOT JUST PLAYING WAR: Ahmed, the son of a fighter in
the Free Syrian Army, smokes and stands guard with an AK-47
in front of a barricade protecting rebels from snipers.
Bloody civil war puts kids in line of fire

By ANDY SOLTIS
From With Times of London and Post Wire Services
Last Updated: 6:03 AM, March 29, 2013
Posted: 12:48 AM, March 29, 201

This is what the brutal Syrian civil war has come to — a 7-year-old toting an AK-47.

Ahmed, the son of a fighter in the Free Syrian Army, was photographed bearing an assault rifle nearly as big as him and taking a drag on a cigarette as he guarded a barricade that shelters rebels from government snipers.

New York-born photojournalist Sebastiano Tomada Piccolomini, 26, was allowed to get this close to the rebels in a once-fashionable district in the city of Aleppo and snapped this picture of Ahmed to illustrate how savage the war has become.

“When you are on the front line, it’s very easy to bond with those around you,” Piccolomini told The Times of London. “They took me as one of them. I crawled, ducked, jumped, yelled and breathed everything they did. I watched them die.”

Sebastiano Tomada Piccolomini/Sipa
NOT JUST PLAYING WAR: Ahmed, the son of a fighter in the Free Syrian Army, smokes and stands guard with an AK-47 in front of a barricade protecting rebels from snipers.
Teenagers and youngsters have increasingly been drawn into the two-year conflict, which has killed more than 70,000 people.

More than 4,200 of the dead have been children, according to an opposition group. The UN regards the recruitment or even volunteer enlistment of youths under the age of 18 as a war crime.

But Human Rights Watch, which has monitored the struggle to bring down President Bashar al-Assad’s regime, found several boys in Syria last year who said they had been recruited and trained to fight.

The cost of the war to Syria’s youth was underscored yesterday when mortar fire killed at least 10 students at Damascus University, authorities said.

State-run TV blamed the rebels for the attack on an open-air campus cafeteria. It showed footage of plastic tables and chairs toppled, shattered glass and pens and books scattered on the floor.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights confirmed the attack, saying 13 were killed and many of the 20 wounded were in critical condition.

“No one anywhere in the world can imagine a more criminal act than this,” the state-run SANA news agency quoted Amer al-Mardini, the president of the university, as saying.

Anti-Bashar activists accused the regime of launching the attack to tarnish the opposition’s image. Last weekend, rebel groups sent out warnings on the Internet, saying they planned to intensify strikes on government and military sites in Damascus in what they called “Operation Shaking the Fort.”

But other shellings have occurred near civilian targets, including the Sheraton Hotel and a soccer stadium, both on Damascus’ west side. Mortar shells also have struck in areas to the east, like the Christian neighborhood of Bab Touma.

The United Nations said on Monday it would withdraw about half of its international staff from Damascus after a mortar bomb landed near their hotel.

Also yesterday, Russia harshly criticized the Arab League’s recognition of the Syrian opposition as the only representative of the country.

It said the league’s decision at a summit in Qatar to let the main opposition group take over Syria killed efforts to negotiate a peaceful end to the civil war.

"I think our posture is baffling, there is no strategic design, we're using slogans," slammed Brzezinski on MSNBC's Morning Joe Friday. "It's a tragedy and it's a mess in the making," he said. "I do not see what the United States right now is trying to accomplish."

The president's abrupt decision to arm Syrian rebels is a huge mistake, one driven by emotion and propaganda not the kind of strategic White House plan that has marked past successful interventions in civil wars, according to former Carter-era national security chief Zbigniew Brzezinski.

In a broad attack on President Obama's vague interventionist policy, the highly-respected international affairs analyst warned that by jumping in to Syria's civil war with no plan is likely to lead to another costly and extended military action that could eventually draw U.S. forces into a clash with Syria's top ally Iran.

"I think our posture is baffling, there no strategic design, we're using slogans," slammed Brzezinski on MSNBC's Morning Joe Friday. "It's a tragedy and it's a mess in the making," he said. "I do not see what the United States right now is trying to accomplish."

The administration Thursday changed its wait-and-see policy, sparked by Syrian admissions it had used chemical weapons in the civil war. The new policy of arming rebels was announced by deputy national security advisor Ben Rhodes.

"It all seems to me rather sporadic, chaotic, unstructured, undirected," said Brzezinski. "I think we need a serious policy review with the top people involved, not just an announcement from the deputy head of the NSC that an important event has taken place and we will be reacted to it."

Several lawmakers have been pressing Obama to arm rebels and create a no-fly zone, two things the president is finally willing to do. The effectiveness of a go-it-alone policy, however, has been questioned in the military, especially plans for a no-fly zone.

Brzezinski said, "we are running the risk of getting into another war in the region which may last for years and I don't see any real strategic guidance to what we are doing. I see a lot of rhetoric, a lot emotion, a lot of propaganda in fact."

Instead, he advised that the administration build a coalition that includes Russia, Japan, China and India to put pressure on Syria's ruling regime to give up.

"That is the kind of response that might have some effect. Instead we are essentially engaging in mass propaganda, portraying this as a democratic war," said Brze

__________________
"Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father ... And then will I profess unto them, I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity."

"If the people let government decide what foods they eat and what medicines they take, their bodies will soon be in as sorry a state as are the souls of those who live under tyranny." - Thomas Jefferson

Support the refugees in Jordan and elsewhere. Support Israel to defend its own borders and contain Hezbollah - And hope that with time and enough internecine bloodletting, the Sunnis and Shiites will find a way to peace after 13 centuries of pointless, primitive hatred.

FYI: The Quran discourages Muslims from receiving help from infidels like the US.

I've never understood why the use of chemical weapons should be our "red line".

If you hypothetically have decided you won't intervene if a government swiss-cheeses its people under a hail of bullets, why should gassing them be any different?

The only "red line" we ought to have should be the irresponsible/crazy use of infectious disease as a weapon, only because it could spread to harm people who aren't inoculated in other countries who are not involved, including maybe your own. Maybe some gigantic forms of fallout-producing nuclear weapons for similar reasons.

__________________ how many emo kids does it take to change a lightbulb? HOW MANY?! none they just sit in the dark and cry

Why are we still fighting with Al Qaeda and giving them weapons in Syria? It is getting harder and harder to tell one full bearded, wild eyed madman from another.

Al Arabiya News

Qaeda in Iraq rejects Zawahiri ruling on Nusra

Saturday, 15 June 2013

Al-Qaeda’s leader in Iraq has defied orders from the group’s global chief, Ayman al-Zawahiri, to break up his claimed union with a jihadist group in Syria, according to an audio message released Saturday.

The purported remarks by Islamic State of Iraq head Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in the message posted on jihadist forums indicate tensions between ISI and Al-Qaeda’s central command.

In April, Baghdadi announced that ISI had merged with Syria’s Al-Nusra Front.
Al-Nusra leader Abu Mohammed al-Jawlani acknowledged a relationship between the two groups, but he denied there had been a merger and publicly pledged his allegiance to Zawahiri.

Yet in Saturday’s message, the man identified as Baghdadi said “the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant remains, as long as there is blood in our veins and our eyes are blinking.

“It remains, and we will not compromise; we will not give up... until we die.”

Earlier this month, Zawahiri ruled that the ISI and Al-Nusra should operate as separate entities, according to a letter posted on Al-Jazeera’s website.

Baghdadi had “made a mistake” by announcing a merger “without consulting us,” he said.

The merger plan has been “damaging to all jihadists,” Zawahiri said, adding that “Al-Nusra Front is an independent branch of Al-Qaeda.”

But the message on Saturday said: “Regarding the message which was attributed to Sheikh Ayman al-Zawahiri ... (I) was put in a situation, to choose between God’s command and an order against God.”

“I chose the order of my God, over the order against it in the message.”

The audio message could not immediately be independently verified.
Al-Nusra Front, created in January 2012, joined Al-Qaeda last December on a US list of foreign terrorist organizations.

Among elements fighting to oust the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, it is one of the best armed and most successful on the battlefield. It has carried out some of the deadliest attacks in the uprising, claiming responsibility for several suicide bombings.

This civil war is being instigated from the outside to large degree just as Libya was. It's just the next phase of A Clean Break written by some NeoCons in the late 1990's. Next stop, Iran, despite a reformer winning elections. They want global control.

An older rebel who leads a few dozen fighters on one of the front lines in Aleppo was skeptical. “I’ll believe that America is helping us when I see American arms in my group’s hands, not statements and food baskets,” said the 40-year-old fighter, who calls himself Abu Zaki. “We will accept all support even from Satan to finish the Assad regime, then we will not forget those who stand and support us and who stand and support the regime.”

Quote:

Reflecting the questions that remain about which rebels the United States will arm, the commander, Jamal Maarouf, said he did not know if his group would qualify.

“The American said they will arm moderate battalions,” he said. “I don’t know if my battalion is moderate.”

Hania Mourtada contributed reporting from Beirut, Lebanon, and an employee of The New York Times from Aleppo, Syria.